Eat, drink, and be wary

This pferdkaese reminds me a lot about the whinnying over tobacco use. Seriously, if soda or cigs are that bad for you? Ban them outright. Otherwise it really isn’t anything to do with “safety” or “public health” or any such fig leaf; it’s about control. And that all of this is coming from the man who shoved through a revocation of the term limits on his office so he could rule a third time.

Sure, he says it was only because of an “extraordinary one-time thing.” But it wasn’t. There’s always some financial crisis looming. This isn’t the first time even in my lifetime that the national or world economy has tanked. You know what was an extraordinary one-time thing? Foreign agents driving airliners into skyscrapers, that’s what – and Rudy Guiliani didn’t serve a third damned term. He talked about it but it wasn’t a good idea even then; he gave way to this tinpot potentate – one who now hypocritically says that he supports changing it back so no mere human peasant can have the opportunity. None are as enlightened as he, and thus shan’t be trusted with such awesome power! And I’m not fond of hearing, “Oh, but it was legally done!” Are you fighting Big Beverage “legally,” Mayor Ninnyhammer, or are you just ruling by fiat without any input from the City Council? The answer is B, isn’t it?

Again – it’s about control. The mandatory posting of nutritional information and calorie contents was supposed to be enough. Apparently not, so now it’s going to be blunt force. I’m fond of joking that parody is a dying art because it’s so hard to stay ahead of the idiot curve, but this is nearly beyond a joke, now. On Futurama, Leela once said something like: “This is Fry’s decision to make… and he made it wrong, so now we’re going to butt in and do it for him.” Oh, Mayor? THIS WAS NOT MEANT AS ADVICE. Stop it.

Sometimes, debate and argument don’t really work, because a person isn’t really being reasonable at all. That’s when you resort to ridicule. If you make the dumb idea seem dumb even to the person promoting it, you might stay their meddling, restless hand when ironclad logic fails. The Twitter hashtag #BloombergMovieTitles sprang up and a good many people spent hours savaging Bloomberg’s pompous overreach. You can click the tag to see the top lines… some of my contributions are below. (Hard to come up with ones others didn’t, so I hope I didn’t rip anyone off. I mean, The Good The Bad and The “X” is just a slam-dunk.)

Heavy-Handed Luke

Lord of the Servings

Smokey and the Big Gulp

Ten Things I Hate About Yoo-Hoo

Everything You Ever Wanted to Eat, Drink, or Smoke, but Weren’t Allowed To